The After Wife

by Gigi Levangie Grazer

[Leah]

Gigi Levangie Grazer is an author with quite a few novels to her name, as well as a successful TV show and movie (I think), but I’ve never tried any of her novels. I did attempt to read Fairytale Ending (also published as Queen Takes King) but it did not appeal to me in the slightest. I couldn’t get into it at all and didn’t make it past the first chapte.r When I saw her new novel, The After Wife, on NetGalley, and read the synopsis, I was intrigued. I love novels that deal with the afterlife in one way or another, Cally Taylor’s Heaven Can Wait and Sophie Kinsella’s Twenties Girl being prime examples and The After Wife sounded brilliant, so I downloaded it to my Kindle and happily started reading.

The After Wife tells the tale of Hannah Bernal, who is living the dream. She has a beautiful house – Casa Sugar, the best friends a girl could ask for, a dream job, and a perfect husband and daughter. Until one day it all goes epically wrong, and her husband is killed. After that, Hannah’s life falls apart. She struggles to make her mortgage payments, struggles to look after her daughter, and generally just struggles with day-to-day life now that John is no longer with her, no longer there to help her whenever she needs it. Just to make Hannah’s life even worse, she suddenly finds she can talk to dead people. Not in a Sixth-Sense, creepy sort of way, but in a dead-people-talk-sense-even-though-it’s-strange kind of way. It IS creepy, I suppose, but it works.

I thought The After Wife was a brilliant read. I really did. I love that this year books I would never normally read are turning out to be some of my favourites, that they surprise me in all the right ways. I loved Hannah’s story. I love how Gigi Levangie Grazer showed us how life was for Hannah before John died, how it showed us in those first few chapters how much they loved each other, making it all the more worse when he dies. Hannah’s grief was so real, so there, and to follow her on her journey was, I’d like to say privileged but that sounds silly, it was sad, yes, but it was a worthwhile journey. It was the sort of journey that satisfies you when you finish, that although, sure, she lost her husband, she didn’t let that be the death of her, so to speak. The whole spiritual/ghost thing was so, so, so well done. It’s such a rare thing in Chick Lit (authors are afraid to put anything out there in their novels these days) but it was done excellently. I fell in love with the people Hannah talked to, I liked how she could still speak to John, could speak to Trish, who previously owned Casa Sugar.

It was such a touching, warm, moving novel. I loved that Hannah had her own “grief team”, consisting of her three best friends, Jay, Aimee and Chloe. I liked how all four of them were so separate and different. The writing was spot-on, it was so good that I could barely put the book down, I was always saying just one more chapter and I stayed up past midnight to finish the novel. That’s a novel well done as far as I was concerned. And it was well done. The only criticism I have is there’s a bit of a distasteful remark/joke in there. Hannah and Jay are out exercising on some steps and Hannah stops and Jay says that if they didn’t get moving, they’d be trampled and Jay says “It’s like being at a Liverpool soccer match” or similar. I took that as a reference to the fans being killed at Hillsborough years ago, and it was distasteful, as a football fan and as a person. I don’t know if that was intentional or not, but anyone who knows Liverpool and read that line would probably find it wrong and I’d have personally taken that out, changed it to something lighter, something in which people didn’t die. Apart from that, I loved it. Absoloutely, utterly loved it. If you’re not a fan of ghosts then this isn’t the book for you, but if you loved Twenties Girl or Heaven Can Wait (as I did) you will adore The After Wife, it was a triumph.